sound patrol 5-12-05

Master mumbler makes magnificent music

South San Gabriel
The Carlton Chronicles: Not until the Operations Through
(Misra)

Will Johnson is the indie-rock
equivalent of Joyce Carol Oates, cranking out a seemingly endless
supply of songs for his various musical personae: cerebral
head-bangers for Centro-matic, rawboned alt-folk for his solo
ventures, and delirious countrified pop for South San Gabriel, a
band that comprises all four members of Centro-matic plus a
rotating cast of guest musicians. As with Oates, the quality of
Johnson’s work is so consistently excellent that it seems
petty to carp about his prodigious output: Although keeping up is
sometimes a challenge, the rewards are rich for those who bother.

The Carlton Chronicles: Not Until the
Operation’s Through, the third
SSG release, is no exception — at least in sonic terms.
Thematically, however, it’s something of a risk: a song cycle
from the point of view of a sick cat, the titular Carlton, whose
delights and misadventures are elliptically recounted over the
course of the CD’s nine tracks. If you ask me or my
kitty-daddy, there can never be too many songs about cats
(discounting dumb rockabilly slang and euphemisms for female
genitalia, of course). But if you’re one of those sorry
ailurophobes who can’t appreciate the finer points of feline
consciousness, never fear, because the concept isn’t
something that you could possibly divine without a lyric sheet.
Johnson is a master mumbler — imagine a Murmur-era Michael Stipe
with a mouth full of cough syrup and a head full of codeine —
and the few decipherable lines that emerge are oblique and
evocative enough to apply to almost anyone or anything.

Ultimately, the success of the album depends
on the music, which, true to form, is unremittingly gorgeous.
Johnson and his compatriots lay out iridescent doper vistas
glimmering with pedal-steel guitars, banjos, vibraphones, organs,
synths, multitracked vocal harmonies, and stray bursts of Zuma-worthy feedback.
Despite the layers of instrumentation, producer/engineer (and
drummer extraordinaire) Matt Pence keeps the feel spacious and loose, with a trippy lucidity that makes
Johnson’s gnomic wordplay seem profound even at its most
impenetrable.

Make no mistake: Nouvelle Vague is
a gimmick, but, as gimmicks go, it’s a pretty good one.
French DJ/producer/multiinstrumentalists Marc Collin and Olivier
Libaux took 14 songs from the late-’70s/early-’80s
postpunk canon, tricked them out with bossa nova arrangements, and
turned them over to a bunch of sweet-throated Eurobabes who, if the
press kit is to be believed, had never heard the originals. As fate
would have it, nouvelle vague and bossa novaÂ both mean “new wave,” although
the Portuguese term refers not to skinny ties and such but to a
distinctively Brazilian genre that combines gentle tropical
rhythms, melancholy lyrics, and early-’60s West Coast jazz
progressions. With her wispy voice, languid phrasing, and ingenuous
good looks, Astrud Gilberto was the anti-diva who epitomized this
aesthetic; Nouvelle Vague’s eight rotating lead vocalists
(only one of whom is actually Brazilian) are all heavily in her
debt.

Obviously the recontextualization changes
everything, and not always for the better. In its original
incarnation, the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” is a
dub-drenched, punk-powered paean to class warfare. Nouvelle
Vague’s rendition, by contrast, is merely pleasant in a
lobotomized-sex-kitten kind of way. The cover of XTC’s
“Making Plans for Nigel” is more successful; its
wistful melody underscores the cynical lyrics instead of defanging
them. Best of all, though, is the cover of the Dead Kennedys’
“Too Drunk Too F**k,” wherein French chanteuse Camille
giggles and slurs her way through a litany of filth, transforming
the frenetic self-loathing of the SoCal hardcore staple into
something that’s sexy and playful, not just horny and dumb.